The Narnia Writing Tag

I love Narnia.  I love writing.  So I ask you, could there be a more perfect tag?  I think not.

If you follow me over on bookstagram (if you don't and you want to, there's the link!) you probably know that I'm obsessed with The Chronicles of Narnia. 

Can you blame me, really?  No.  So anyway whilst I was perusing Olivia's newest post (she's pretty great, you should go follow her), I noticed the words narnia, writing, and tag in one of the links in the post.  And, like, how was I not going to click on that?  So here we go I'm stealing another tag from Olivia.  Oops.

But if you've never heard about my Bonnie and Clyde WIP, get ready to get way more information than you could possibly ever want.  Yay!  (plus some aesthetics because aesthetics are fun)

Narnia - Where is your story set?

 

 

The story opens in 1930 (or 1931, I haven't quite decided yet) in Rowena, Texas.  The rest of it stays in the surrounding states.

The Magician's Nephew - How did you come up with the idea for your story?

 

 

It was a mixture of a few things.  Bonnie and Clyde were kind of familiar names to me, showing up in the various history shows I would watch as a tween (Mysteries at the Museum was a fave).  In 2018 I discovered the Broadway musical and quickly became obsessed.  But it wasn't until Nadine Brandes was gearing up to release Romanov and I started thinking about other historical figures in magical settings that the idea of Bonnie and Clyde on the hunt for magic stuck.
The original concept was "what if instead of the stock market collapsing, magic disappeared?" and it's kind of spiraled from there.
((also, sidenote, Magician's Nephew is my favorite book of all time.  jsyk))

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - How do your characters meet?

 

 

(ooh, a first draft excerpt, aren't we fancy? xD) 
So unlike the actual Bonnie and Clyde, who met only a few months before they ran away together, mine were friends as kids.  Because I'm a sucker for a good childhood-friends-to-lovers story.  But the story kicks off when Clyde, newly out of jail, rolls back into town, much to Bonnie's disappointment and the other Rowena girls' delight.

The Horse and His Boy - Are there animals in your story?

Not really, sadly.  There may be a dog somewhere along the line.  Because everyone can use a dog, tbh.

Prince Caspian - Which of your characters turned out different than expected?

 

 

Both Bonnie and Clyde decided they didn't want to be what I originally thought they did.  I'm a very character-driven writer anyway, so when I started to feel like I was forcing these two into personalities that didn't fit, I took a step back.  At first, I thought Clyde was the angry one, fueled by the idea of revenge and not afraid to take down whoever got in his way, and Bonnie was the soft one, standing beside him and scared out of her mind.  Turns out I got that backwards.  Bonnie is broken and scarred and figures that losing her life might be preferable to living it.  Clyde is hiding, scared and alone, and fighting more out of desperation to change things than from rage.  Wow, that got sad.  Oops.  But yeah, these two have definitely changed a lot from the original concept, and they've probably still got a lot of changing to do.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - What is one of your character's personal quest?

 

Clyde is determined to keep what happened to his parents from happening to anyone else.  And if that means finding magic first, that's what he's going to do.

The Silver Chair - Who is the villain?

  

Hehe... well, that's funny.  I don't really know yet?  Not that I don't expect there to be people against them - there will be plenty of those - but if there's a defined "big bad guy", I haven't found him yet.

The Last Battle - Does your story end like you expect it to?

 

 

Uh... I'm not going to say anything on that front.

The Pevensies - Friendship or sibling group?

 

 

Yes!  There are so many platonic relationships in this story and I'm thriving.  Right now, Bonnie's sister Billie Jean and brother Buster (represented in this aesthetic) are my faves, simply because I just spent a whole chapter with Buster and I didn't expect him to play as big of a role as he does.  This keeps happening to me; characters insist they're important and who am I to tell them they're wrong?  But there's also Clyde's siblings (there are 4 of them) and the friendships between the families and a few friends outside of them and yes to all the platonic love!!

Reepicheep - Is there magic in your story? If so, what kind?

 

 

Yes again!  Developing a magic system of my own has been one of my favorite parts of writing this book, tbh.  So my magic functions in a liquid form, and comes (or used to come) in various colors that can do various things.  Magic users are really good at getting the magic to do what they want it to, but one really greedy magic user figured out how to distill it into a weaker form that pretty much anyone can use.  Since then, the world adapted to using magic to solve most of their problems, power their machines, etc.  But then one day in 1929 it decided to vanish, and no one knows why or where it went.  Yeah.


So there you have it!  This is my Bonnie and Clyde story.  I hope you've enjoyed being introduced.  (or just getting to know each other better, if you've already heard about it)  I really love this book a lot, and so far it's been a ton of fun to write, and completely different from anything else I've written before.  Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just meant a good stretch of my brain.

Are you writing anything?  Tell me about your WIP in the comments!

~ Abby

((I don't own any of the pictures, I found them all on Pinterest.))